


Matinee Idol

by fmo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1940s, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 22:20:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2167293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes is known for breaking absolutely anyone’s fingers when paid well to do it, but Steve definitely doesn’t exactly know that. “You sure are popular, Buck,” Steve says.</p><p>Bucky slings his arm around Steve’s shoulders. “I meet a lot of people,” he says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Matinee Idol

Bucky knows that people who know about some of the stuff he does would say he should feel bad. Sometimes when Steve makes Bucky go to church, and Steve is praying next to him over whatever tiny sins Steve’s committed, Bucky closes his eyes and says to God: “Well, I guess you know what I’ve done.” He’s not going to apologize for it, though. His old sixth-grade teacher always used to say that saying sorry and then going to do the same thing again anyway is even worse than not saying sorry at all.

So Bucky picks up odd jobs (gun running), delivers telegrams (money laundering), works at the factory (holds a gun to the back of the union leader). A lot of people in Brooklyn know Bucky Barnes, so Bucky waves hi to them when he walks around with Steve. Bucky Barnes is known for breaking absolutely anyone’s fingers when paid well to do it, but Steve definitely doesn’t exactly know that. “You sure are popular, Buck,” Steve says.

Bucky slings his arm around Steve’s shoulders. “I meet a lot of people,” he says.

Thing is, nobody had food when they were growing up. It was kind of a tough time. But, in the end, Steve needs to go to the hospital a lot and Bucky always has money for that. Bucky has money for an apartment too, not some crappy rented room but a nice apartment in a brick building. If there’s anything Bucky’s learned in his life, is that you don’t get anywhere in life without money, and you don’t get anywhere as a kid with beat-up shoes and no lunch if you’re not prepared to do what you need to do.

Bucky has put three people in the Hudson. None of them were particularly wonderful people, as far as he knows. But when he comes home from the third, and Steve’s back from his art class and waiting there for the Bucky who was working construction in Manhattan today, it feels nice to be Bucky the construction worker, Bucky the shift supervisor.

“You gotta take a day off,” Steve says sternly, big eyebrows frowning in his small face. “Look, let me—“

“And I told you I don’t like sitting around,” Bucky says, leafing through their mail.

But when he stops by Helen the secretary’s desk on the way out of the back room of the construction office where he doesn’t work and says, “You wouldn’t know a girl who’d mind coming along with my friend on a double date,” Helen always finds a friend; the girls always do. Bucky’s nobody that important, just the reliable kind of businessman with shirts pressed fresh from the laundry and a recent haircut, but too much ambition can be a bad thing. The girls appreciate that. They like doing a favor for Bucky.

They like doing a favor for Bucky, and Bucky likes it when it’s a nice evening and Steve’s out with him and the girls at the movies. “I took care of it,” Bucky says every Friday night when he’s pulling out Steve’s good clothes for him to get changed into, and Steve shakes his head and says, “Jeez, Buck, what couldn’t you charm a girl to do?” Steve pretends to be exasperated and says, with his little smile, “You’re like Clark Gable and Cary Grant all rolled into one.” Then Bucky’s reflection in the dark windows of the streets looks dapper and spritely as it dances along in his wake.

People used to get into scraps with Steve a lot. These days it happens a lot less.  Perhaps they start getting mad and then their friends say something into their ears, and then they walk away.

Sometimes late at night, when it’s too late for the factory job Bucky doesn’t work or the telegrams he doesn’t deliver, Bucky goes out dancing alone. He wishes he didn’t have to leave Steve by himself, but he tries to be quick, washes his hands before he goes home and checks his tie, and then ruffles his hair with his fingers and ambles in to the apartment after midnight, walking like his feet are sore. “It was a good night,” he says, soft, and slumps onto the sofa, and imagines music. Steve sits next to him and looks at him, and sometimes unlaces his shoes.

“Did you walk her home?” Steve asks once in a while. And then Bucky closes his eyes and tells Steve all about his night, about Dorothy or June or whatever he’s decided her name is, and Steve listens, listens, and it becomes real.

That’s all that really matters. At home he’s Bucky Barnes, former star athlete of the high school, brilliant scholar who could’ve gone to college, the darling of Brooklyn, Steve Rogers’ best friend since they were kids. That is the most important thing. 

Only sometimes Bucky worries that someone will say something to Steve, but nobody ever does. The people Steve talks to, artist types he’s met in his classes who are all writing novels and want to live in Paris, aren’t people who would know Bucky. That’s the only thing Bucky is ever afraid of until his number comes up and he’s drafted in the war Steve won’t stop talking about.

It’s funny, really. In a certain sense, it’s hilarious. The day Bucky finds out, he gets in trouble a little bit, because it was so funny he knocked two teeth out of a guy’s mouth out back of a car lot when all he was supposed to do is put the fear of God into him. Bucky has to ice his hand before he comes home. Once he's there, he reluctantly tells Steve about how he had to step in to help out a girl from work whose old boyfriend wouldn’t leave her alone. Steve shakes his head and says, “After all the times you yelled at me. Here, let me look at it, you hypocrite.” Tenderly, tenderly Steve puts his fingertips on Bucky’s knuckles, dabs at them with soaked cotton wool that stings the cracks in his skin.

Later, Bucky thinks, he’ll tell Steve he’s decided to enlist, because after all it’s the right thing to do.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments are adored.
> 
> Come say hi to me at fmowrites.tumblr.com, and if you found this fic through a rec, please tell me! I love to hear about being recced.


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